On China And Russia Hacking Into US, "No Hard Feelings"

It's all good old fashioned espionage without the physical threat of getting caught, that's all. In fact, China and Russia, believed to be the main sources of cyber attacks on U.S. government and corporate computer networks, have no interest in actually harming the U.S. economy. They just want to help their own without having to pay big bucks for it.

Why spend years developing a better computer tablet, when you can just steal the original model from Apple?

This week, a U.S. intelligence report blamed Russia and China for hacking into private computer networks, likely seeking patent and technology information. China and Russia governments both deny hacking into U.S. based computer systems.

The chances of proving the cyber attacks are coming from Moscow or Beijing are remote. Sophisticated hackers can hijack remote computers and set them up as 'zombie' computers, making it look like a discovered hack at the Pentagon is coming from Fairfax, Va instead of Russian government agencies in Moscow.

The report said that a number of U.S. companies have experienced cyber attacks on their networks that originated from China, in particular. However, U.S. intelligence agencies cannot confirm who specifically is behind them, Reuters reports. Is it the government? Is it a company? Is it two high-tech college buddies in Shenzhen? Nobody knows.

Intelligence officials are quick to allege that it is part of the national policy of China and Russia to try to acquire sensitive technology for their own economic development. The State Department in June said it had asked Beijing to investigate Google's (GOOG) allegation of a cyber attack that it claims had originated in China.

"It's not that China is hacking computers in order to upload malware," says Joseph Steinberg, CEO of Green Armor Solutions, a privately held IT security firm focused on user authentication software. "China's government, like Russia's, has no incentive to cripple the U.S. economy. It's more of a way to get into our computer networks, spy on them and plagiarize whatever it is they are looking for. It is cheaper than spending billions on trial and error development when you can just steal the data instead."

Governments that hack into foreign computer networks have plausible deniability on their side. Not all governments are hacking into computers to write malicious code into their systems, but some are, and their authors are hard to detect. In 2010, for example, the stuxnet worm shut down Iran's electric power and its capacity to enrich uranium by tricking nuclear power plants into thinking they were doing one procedure, when they were really doing something entirely different.

Moscow based IT security firm Kaspersky Lab thinks that the stuxnet worm might have originated from Israel. They also say it could have been the U.S. and U.K. Yet, it could also be a host of other countries who do not want to see Iran enrich uranium for nuclear power because of fears it could eventually use that technology to build a nuclear weapon.

"Today, you don't have to order a bombing campaign if you want to take out some site in a country. You can write code that shuts down anything, anywhere, and no one can truly identify you as the author," Steinberg says.

Russia and China both have the scientific and educational background to conduct sophisticated virtual espionage and cyber attacks. They also have the incentive to do it. Why spend years trying to design a stealth bomber, when you can copy the U.S. technology instead?

Steinberg says that the recent Wikileaks exposure shows that government, and corporate, secrets are easy to obtain -- especially for computer hackers who know their way around computer language.

"You can't just tell China and Russia to stop spying on us. These things are going to keep happening especially in countries where there is an incentive to steal information, or upload viruses onto a competitors network. You have to devise better technology and come up with better ways to classify information," he says. "There is more at stake digitally speaking than ever before."